Many electronic devices, such as cellular telephones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), have the need for a digital camera to be included in the design. Such combined devices have been manufactured. The digital cameras for such combined devices are designed for general photography use. These cameras can also be used to capture images of printed text, such as the text on business cards. If OCR is performed on a digital image of text, a text file may be generated.
OCR requires high definition images. For some documents, several hundred thousand pixels or more may be required to obtain the desired recognition accuracy. However, some digital cameras, such as some digital cameras for cell phones, may only have a small number of pixels (e.g., 352×288). In such limited-pixel systems, only a small portion of a document can be imaged at a high enough resolution for OCR. Multiple images of a document can be “stitched” together to create a larger image with more pixels. Then, OCR can be performed on the larger image. But it is computationally intensive to perform such image stitching, and the lens distortion of multiple images makes stitching very difficult, if not impossible, in some cases.
It would be desirable to provide a more accurate and less computationally intensive system and method for converting digital images of a document into an electronic text file.